About a year or so after I first became MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, a group of residents came to my advice surgery to complain about the conditions in their tower block – Brodick House. Nothing unusual in that you might think. Until I tell you that one of their concerns was a luminous green gunge oozing out of the electrical sockets.

It turned out this wasn't a scene from Ghostbusters come to life in the East End. The wiring was so long past its sell-by date that it was melting its plastic coating. Tenants themselves were equally bothered by the wind blowing through their windows, the leaking pipework, unreliable lifts, dodgy heating and junkies in the stairwell. But the ghostly gunge always struck me as emblematic of Brodick House's malaise.

By 1997, Tower Hamlets Council's 40,000 homes had suffered from almost two decades of under-investment by the Thatcher government and a dodgy Liberal council. Roofs were leaking. Windows were rotting. Bathrooms were damp. And kitchens were falling apart.

Many blocks deserved to be condemned as uninhabitable. But instead, they were home to thousands of young families and older people. That's why I was so supportive of Labour's pledge to bring all social housing up to a decent standard. Of course, with the need to focus scarce funding on new social housing that meant John Prescott was forced to continue transferring council stock to housing associations.

In Tower Hamlets, stock transfers to locally-based housing associations had initially proved successful. Old Ford Housing, Poplar HARCA and Tower Hamlets Community Housing all put tenants at the heart of decision-making for the future of their estates. But the bigger associations who moved in later didn't always take that approach. And with the rise of Defend Council Housing, stock transfer became deeply controversial.

After the failure of several transfer ballots, the Labour council rightly switched track and established an Arms Length Management Organisation (ALMO) for its remaining council homes. In 2009, with basic housing management improving, Labour's Housing Minister, John Healey, promised Tower Hamlets would get £222million to bring homes up to a decent standard.

We all know what happened next. Newly-elected Coalition ministers went through the capital investment programme with a scythe. The Homes and Communities Agency's budget was cut by almost two-thirds in the 2010 Spending Review. Tower Hamlets' funding was cut to just £94m.

Worse still, that funding was 'backloaded' – with just a quarter available in the first two years. Despite that skewed spending profile, ministers insisted on ridiculously high numbers of homes being brought up to a decent standard with the money. This forced Tower Hamlets Council to focus on the 'low hanging fruit' of homes that were in the least worst condition.

In the past two years, a hundred maisonettes on the St Stephen's Estate have received new kitchens and bathrooms, while tenants in Brodick House – which sits in the middle of it – have had nothing. I despair of a government that forces those in the worst housing conditions to wait longest for improvement works – wilfully ignoring their impact on the education, health and life chances of the children living there.

Thanks to determined campaigning by tenants, Brodick House has now been included in next year's decent homes programme. That is welcome, but there are thousands more families in equally poor conditions in other blocks. Meanwhile, as Save the Children recently reminded us, the number of overcrowded young families in London is growing year on year as the Coalition runs down social housing again like a re-run of the 1980s.

We got Brodick House rewired in the end and the green gunge is no more. But to this day, Ray Parker Junior's lyrics spring to my mind every time I walk past the block on the way to my children's school. One thing's for sure. If there's something strange in your tower block .... don't bother calling Eric Pickles!

Although I turned down the chance to appear on Dancing on Ice seven years in a row, I finally cracked. I managed to stay upright during the live TV performances, but I unfortunately tripped up my lovely partner Mark Hanretty during our Save-Me skate, and dislocated his shoulder. Ouch. I've since taken up ice-skating and have a lesson every Sunday morning!

'If you ever see me dancing on TV," Oona King wrote in her diaries, published after the former Labour MP for Bethnal Green and Bow lost her seat in the 2005 general election's bloodiest battle, "I can only apologise in advance." In that first year out of work, she turned down offers to appear on I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here and host her own chat show. The only reality TV programme she "secretly yearned to do," she writes, was Dancing On Ice. Her long-suffering husband joked he would divorce her if she did it. Everyone else said it would "irrevocably ruin" her career.

Idris goes to Parliament

Questions in Parliament

I knew Jo because we both worked for the Kinnocks, we both worked for the Browns, we both worked for Labour Women's Network - which Jo Chaired - and we both had a habit of ending up in refugee camps.

In the run-up to Jo's election as an MP, she told me my diaries of Westminster nearly put her off. "Thing is", she said, "I know my constituency would never cause me as much grief as yours." This is the only thing Jo was wrong about.

Empowering women means giving them the practical tools to escape poverty and prejudice. Around the world, including here in Britain, a baby girl’s life chances are disadvantaged in comparison to her brother’s at almost every turn, and once she becomes a woman the disadvantage becomes entrenched.

Baroness King of Bow (Lab): My Lords, the online world is the real world for digital natives. That is exactly what worries so many of us. However, we would be doing our children a huge disservice if we viewed their online interactions in only a negative light. In fact, for many young people, the internet is far more likely to be a place of opportunity. The internet will bring them opportunities that generations before them could only dream of.

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DIVERSITY - IS IT BETTER TO BE MIXED RACE?

Sometimes being mixed race is like having a cloak of invisibility. The most remarkable hour of my life came when I put on a head scarf and went out alone to witness riots on the 'Arab street' in the Gaza Strip in June 2003. If the thousands of young Palestinians had known I was a Jew with an American and British passport, and an MP to boot, at best they would have kidnapped me, at worst killed me on the spot.